I'm a fan of the underdog. The guy that nobody really pays attention to because they're so focused on whatever shiny object is in the public eye. The guy who is quietly innovating and creating the most amazing stuff. Tim is that guy. He and 3 co-founders started a company in DC originally focused on making Facebook apps. Just 13 months ago, they had 30 employees. Before that, it was just the 4 of them above a 7-Eleven in Georgetown. Today, they have 1,20o employees and are easily growing past 2,000 this year.

How they ended up with a cross-dressing Superbowl commercial, and how the ROI has justified the ad spend

How they went from 30 people 13 months ago to 1,200 today, growing to 2,000+ this year

How they transitioned from the statup phase --> find biz model that works --> scaling phase

Thoughts on company culture -- specifically that when you're growing as fast as they are, it's OK to state culture; and about their "Surprise & Delight" kitten jumping from cupcake

How they take submissions for annual company motto by employees; and everyone votes. It was "strong moves" in 2010 and it's "boom" in 2011

They get 6,000 resumes per week, he easily sees that growing to 10,000 per week

About how the true opportunity is not in the daily deals business, but rather the local commerce business.

Details on the three businesses LivingSociali is in:

Daily deals has an average price point $35

Local travel is about a "weekend in a box" or "staycations" (Currently a $500MM - $700MM business for LivingSocial). It's really disrupting OTAs. Largest 'flash sales' business.

Living Social adventures: LS operates & produces it themselves. Example: "Become a Canadian for a night" ... Pick any of next 6 Saturdays... rented out ice rink... Poutine... Canadian beers... use scale to work w/ merchants in a different way... rent ice rink during downtime, fill rink during 6 straight Saturdays... LivingSocial employee puts this together. Run 500,000 people through those types of events this year -- average price point $180

Interestingly, the local travel & adventures businesses aren't "50% off types" of businesses. So while daily deals = core engine, the brand is evolving to focus on value, not just discounts.

On raising money: LS has done 5 rounds of funding since Dec 2009... "which means I'm very good at Powerpoint, at this point" ...

When they started raising money: "we had a little money coming in the door.... didn't have a track record.... tougher experience... when the model had started to work, and "we got to the point where you could give us a dollar and we were pretty sure we could turn it into $2, things changed drastically"... timing became important... "should we wait 2 months because we think the company can get a 50% higher valuation in 2 months" ... did a round, then 6 weeks later someone called and said "what are we going to need to pay to get into your company.... we threw out a ludicrous number, and they said "ok" ...

How he picked 3 or 4 terms that really matter... as an entrepreneur pick the 1 or 2 that you really want to maintain... "maintaining board control was very very important for us" in the beginning, wanted to make sure they had the freedom to do that. "we were arrogant enough to not really care about liquidation preference at that early stage." ... "if we can't build this to beyond what the liquidation preference would be, we would be very disappointed anyway" ... "we have more leverage now... we have a very non-standard liquidation preference structure at this point"

How he keyed in on the main important points of the business by pretending that it was 3 years ahead and I wrote an article titled "how livingsocial won the local commerce space" ... what are the 3 subheadings... and he realized he wanted to lock down the largest player in the space... consumer branding needed to go to a different level... needed to be a global brand... need to be a lot more diversified

He closed amazon strategic partnership in early december... in january 1/2 off amazon... seeing first operational benefit now... were selling 80 per second... fastest selling item in history of web

He bought a 230 person company w/ similar culture to expand past the US

Revenue has doubled since nov... added 6MM users in January

Number of people signing up is 3x to 4x what it was 60 days ago

Demographics skew 60/40 female

They have a 4 founder group, all still there... when they started, everyone had a different skillset... were all at revolution health previously...

The challenges of making LS a global enterprise: "we do a lot of meetings at 2am now".... practical considerations, book revenue in different currencies... how do you change product so it works in different cultures... 35% of employee base is outside the US... #1 strategy = find people that have done this effectively before and get them working for us asap

At around the same time in the medieval Islamic world, a vigorous monetary economy was created during the 7th-12th centuries on the basis of the expanding levels of circulation of a stable high-value currency (the dinar). Innovations introduced by Muslim economists, traders and merchants include the earliest uses of credit, cheques, promissory notes,savings accounts, transactional accounts, loaning, trusts, exchange rates, the transfer of credit and debt, and banking institutions for loans and deposits.

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This is the first of a multi-part blog post I'll be writing over the next week that will chronicle my experience raising a $1MM round for AppMakr.

I'll be sharing my learning and experiences as a first-time fundraiser out here in the Valley. My goal is to provide pragmatic tips to help other entrepreneurs understand the process and short-cut the time fundraising typically takes. Think of it as download that condenses 4 months of learning into a series of blogs you can read in an hour.

Be sure to subscribe to the blog if you'd like to get those future posts. Also, we're throwing a party to thank the investors who made this round possible, and celebrating the fact that over 1,000,000 people have now used apps made through AppMakr. RSVP here to join us on 10/28 at 6:30pm. You'll meet Mitch Kapor, George Zachary, Pietro Dova, Ben Narasin and other AppMakr investors.

For this first post, I scored an interview with Naval Ravikant, one of the co-founders of VentureHacks, which runs AngelList. AppMakr went through AngelList, and intros from AngelList were responsible for 54.5% ($545k) of the $1MM we raised. Needless to say, these guys rock. I'd also like to give a huge shout-out to my brother Sam Odio and amazing entrepreneur James Hong, both of whom intro'd me to Nivi & Naval of AngelList at the beginning of our fundraising process.

Our company was barely a year old at the time. We had no real revenue. Spending a million dollars of our investors' money on a land war in Asia would indeed be a revolutionary approach to growing market share.

This was Sergey Brin's suggestion on how to use the Google marketing budget to build brand awareness. Specifically he wanted to inoculate Chechen refugees against cholera. This was quote was from page forty-nine of Edwards' I'm feeling lucky.